Common Paradox Tech Blog

An anonymous reader writes “The Italian government has proposed introducing new restrictions on the Internet after a Facebook fan page for the man who allegedly attacked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Sunday drew almost 100,000 users in under 48 hours. However, the planned clampdown on Internet hate speech sparked a heated debate over censorship and freedom of expression, leading Interior Minister Roberto Maroni to execute a partial U-turn.”

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The debate over whether GNOME should leave the GNU Project makes a lot more sense if you can remember the last six months.

Agram writes “Take a netbook, Wiimotes, Nunchuks, and hemispherical speakers (which were once IKEA salad bowls), toss it up with some Ubuntu goodness and what you get is Virginia Tech’s L2Ork, the world’s first Linux-based laptop orchestra. With its affordable design and support from the Linux community, L2Ork hopes to bring laptop orchestras to K-12 education and beyond. So, regardless whether you wish to hear how L2Ork might sound or to learn how to build your own Linux-based *Ork infrastructure, perhaps this is a good opportunity to reopen the age-old debate: is Linux finally ready for some serious audio work?”

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Google’s exploring a possible new stream of revenue: fee-based streaming television on YouTube. Peter Kafka, of All Things Digital, reports Google is presently in preliminary discussions with networks and studios, with both sides appearing optimistic.

The deal would include YouTube making available first-run television shows commercial-free for $1.99 apiece, like Apple and Amazon. Rather than allow the shows to be downloaded they’d be streamed. Kafka sees this as a problem–users wanting something a tad more tangible than a stream for their $1.99. YouTube, on the other hand, points to studies that show the download/streaming debate to be largely perceptual: buyers only watch a show once, so having or not having shouldn’t make a difference.

Details are still speculative, and might include YouTube shying away from first-run shows, providing instead shows not readily available through other services. There is also the possibility of a monthly subscription service, which Apple and Hulu are presently exploring.

The entrance of another video provider in a rapidly saturating online media marketplace may be a tough go. Users are notorious for not wanting to pay for content. With plenty of options open to them YouTube’s success with such a venture is open to question.

Image Credit: YouTube

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a series of hacked emails and documents that were recently posted on Wikileaks are causing quite a stir in the scientific community. All told, more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia University in the U.K. “The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with. [] Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics’ research was unwelcome: We ‘will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.”

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Today Saul Klein, chairman and co-founder of Seedcamp, the pan-European programme for early stage startups, blogged a long post about Seedcamp’s structure and history. But over the last few weeks I’ve been meeting Saul to tease out, over long conversations, where Seedcamp is at and where it’s going.

The debate is an important one, in part because Seedcamp, as the only Pan-european YCombinator-style organisation, now has a position that is largely unmatched at this level. That is at once a great thing for Europe – afterall, there was nothing else like it before, and Europe really needed a pan-European Seed fund which could also educate young startups. It’s also a potential challenge both for Seedcamp to explain how it operates – after all, despite its laudable openness to date, let’s not forget it’s a business – and for those that want to sit outside the burgeoning Seedcamp ecosystem.

Microsoft (finally) updated the msn.com portal that graces every Internet Explorer installation’s initial homepage. I know what you’re thinking: “who uses IE or MSN.com?!” That is a debate for another day, today is a day to celebrate MSN.com sporting a new design and some added functionality.

There is an online preview of the new layout and the first thing you will notice is that much of the clutter is gone; there is a new sleek design with a spiffy new logo. They have simplified the navigation and content links above the fold as well as integrated Bing search onto the page. Further, they have implemented connections to Microsoft’s new social networking friends: Facebook and Twitter.

Here is the link to the preview so you can see for yourself. The new design is rolling out now and should reach wide availability by early 2010.

As for “Who uses it?” They claim about 600 million unique users globally and 100 million in the U.S. Is there any chance you still use this portal? What do you think about the new layout?

Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.

The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.

Glyn Moody writes “A leaked copy (PDF) of Version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework replaces a requirement in Version 1 for carefully-defined open standards by one for a more general ‘openness’: ‘the willingness of persons, organizations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest.’ It also defines an ‘openness continuum’ that includes ‘non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the “not invented here” syndrome.’ Looks like ‘closed’ is the new ‘open’ in the EU.”

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CWmike writes “Mozilla executives today took shots at Google for pitching its Chrome Frame plug-in as a solution to Internet Explorer’s poor performance, with one arguing that Google’s move will result in ‘browser soup.’ The Mozilla reaction puts the company that builds Firefox on the same side of the debate as rival Microsoft, which has also blasted Google over the plug-in. Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla and currently the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, said in a blog post, ‘The overall effects of Chrome Frame are undesirable. I predict positive results will not be enduring and — and to the extent it is adopted — Chrome Frame will end in growing fragmentation and loss of control for most of us, including Web developers.’ Baker says Chrome Frame’s browser-in-a-browser will confuse users and render some of their familiar tools useless. ‘Once your browser has fragmented into multiple rendering engines, it’s very hard to manage information across Web sites. Some information will be manageable from the browser you use and some information from Chrome Frame. This defeats one of the most important ways in which a browser can help people manage their [Web] experience.’”

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